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Venture Capital News: Rainforest Raises $4M Seed Round

2015-02-10
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Rainforest has raised $4 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures, Rincon, Andreessen Horowitz, Morado, and Crosslink.
Quality Assurance-as-a-service company Rainforest has raised $4 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures, Rincon, Andreessen Horowitz, Morado, and Crosslink.

'The Rainforest team has managed to do something no one else has really nailed yet -- how to truly automate functional QA all the way down to a simple API,' said Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures. 'As a SaaS CEO myself who spent millions of dollars on QA/QE over the years and was never remotely satisfied, I feel like someone has finally cracked the code. I am proud and fortunate to be investing.'

Rainforest launched in 2013 as a QA service running functional tests against a crowd from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Since then, the company has scaled to serve clients such as IBM, Airbnb, Tilt, Zapier, and Zenefits.

'Rainforest QA has developed an elegant solution that automates test initiation and feedback while allowing a massive pool of real human beings to apply their intelligence to a customer's functional tests. The result is faster turnaround, lower cost, better coverage, and the elimination of a huge management time-sink,' said Jim Andelman, Vice President at Rincon. 'Amazon Web Services and others revolutionized storage and compute with their on-demand API-based services: Rainforest QA is doing the same thing for QA.'

In addition to being a Y-Combinator alumnus, Rainforest was also selected last year to join Heavybit, a growing group of the most cutting edge and fastest-maturing developer tools companies.

'To keep up with the pace of continuous software delivery, teams must focus on shipping product without waiting for slow traditional QA or spending engineering resources refactoring tests,' said James Lindenbaum, founder of Heavybit Industries. 'Rainforest provides the speed and flexibility crucial for enterprises to move fast without breaking things.'

The new funding will enable Rainforest to continue to grow exponentially, enabling more and more customers to do continuous deployment without sacrificing code quality, and prevent bugs in production on a much more massive scale.

'Every company that generates revenue online is now under pressure to add updates and improvements up to hundreds of times per day, which is impossible with old-school QA,' said Fred Stevens-Smith, CEO of Rainforest. 'We've created a service that enables our customers to move fast without breaking things by combining the best of both worlds: large-scale automation with a human component. Our customers can fully leverage their existing in-house QA resources, while vastly increasing throughput and decreasing management overhead. Our mission is to help our customers stay laser-focused on generating revenue.'

About Rainforest
Rainforest is QA as a service. They make it easy to test your website by writing tests in plain English, and then running them in less than 30 minutes across thousands of testers in all the browsers you care about.

For more information on Rainforest, visit http://rainforestqa.com.
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